Viet Scandals Keep Coming
This time it could be chairman of the National Assembly
Sources in Hanoi say that police have arrested Nguyen Duy Hung, a young male relative of Vuong Dinh Hue, since 2021 has chaired Vietnam’s National Assembly. Hue has been tipped as the likely successor to Nguyen Phu Trong as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the country’s most powerful political position, at the 15th Party Congress in January 2026. Hue is a former deputy prime minister supervising economic matters as well as former chief of the Hanoi Communist party.
Nguyen Duy Hung, who is an aide to Hue as well as a relative, is said to have been arrested on his return from a trip to China, raising speculation that another major corruption scandal may be about to erupt. Although the details are unknown, vernacular newspapers in Vietnam are reporting that the arrest, whatever it is for, is expected to torpedo Hue’s chances of being chosen as successor to aging and ailing Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong by the Party's 14th Congress in January 202.
It is also likely to mean that the “fiery furnace” campaign of the 80-year-old Nguyễn Phú Trọng, the party general secretary since 2011, is not over, despite having brought down two presidents and two deputy prime ministers who were forced to resign, and hundreds of officials who have been disciplined or jailed.
Vietnam politics have been in turmoil almost since Trong overthrew the popular former prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung in 2015 when Dung, having termed out after two five-year terms, launched a bid to become head of the party, ousting Trong as secretary general. Dung, talented but tainted, failed in his challenge and retired from active political life after, it's said, extracting Trong's promise not to prosecute him for various peccadillos.
Trong briefly held both the PM and State President posts for about 18 months circa 2020. He is the most powerful Vietnamese leader in decades and the scourge of high officials who have combined with unscrupulous businessmen to rip off the state. The most recent fruits of Trong’s crusade against corruption were harvested on April 11 when the 67-year-old Truong My Lan, the country’s richest woman – and maybe Asia’s – was sentenced to death in Ho Chi Minh City for looting one of the country's largest banks over a period of 11 years. Lam was the chairwoman of Van Thinh Phat, a secretive real estate colossus that from 2001 to 2016 gained title to a great deal of property in prime city locations, typically assets seized many years earlier from the wreckage of the former South Vietnamese regime.
As Asia Sentinel reported on April 17, the hunt is now on in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other jurisdictions for the US$27 billion she is accused of having stolen, along with her Hong Kong Chinese husband and a niece. But the scale of corruption extends far beyond Lan and her family. Van Thinh Phat’s spectacular rise and equally remarkable fall coincided with the long tenure of Le Thanh Hai, who became known as “Boss Hai,” as secretary of Ho Chi Minh City’s Communist Party branch, whose rise was chronicled in Asia Sentinel on June 9, 2020, and who has now fallen along with her. About 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers prosecuted the case against 85 others who accompanied her in the dock.
Depending on the details of the arrest of Nguyen Duy Hung in what is normally a deeply secretive state, it remains to be seen how far the cleanup is continuing, and if it short-circuits the political ambitions of Vuong Dinh Hue. Loyal lieutenant Tran Dinh Vuong was eased into retirement in 2021 after Trong was unable to persuade party peers to name Vuong as his successor.
As with the “Tigers and Flies” campaign of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it is questionable if it is possible to root out corruption in an economic and politicalp system that seems to make it generic. Xi started the Tigers and Flies campaign when he became general secretary in 2012. Twelve years later, the anti-corruption campaign has claimed five national leaders, more than 120 high-ranking officials, about a dozen high-ranking military officers, several senior executives of state-owned companies, and 2.3 million civil servants. Despite that scandal, as late as last December, 70 high-ranking members of China’s elite Rocket Force were cashiered. In October, authorities ordered the arrest of former Bank of China Chairman Liu Liange on suspicion of bribery and illegal lending. Some 1.28 million civil servants were disciplined in 2023, according to Xinhua. Clearly, something isn’t working in either the Tiger and Flies or Fiery Furnace campaigns.
As Vietnam analyst David Brown reported in Asia Sentinel when Truong first went on trial, Trong, a Marxist theoretician, is an unlikely leader who for decades toiled in obscurity, railing against party members’ loss of Marxist-Leninist virtue and decrying the erosion of the party’s revolutionary legitimacy.
With his chief assistant, Communist Party Executive Secretary Tran Quoc Vuong, the two have rolled up patronage networks headed by the former head of the state investment bank and by the former minister of transport, who before that was head of PetroVietnam, the largest and most profitable state enterprise. Both men were close to Dung.
More impressive to a skeptical public, Trong and Vuong have gone after other targets wherever they found them. Senior officers of the Ministry of Security have been busted for setting up an online betting scheme and for facilitating the misappropriation of prime sites for luxury hotels in Danang City. Just recently, State President Vo Van Thuong resigned his office. Although there is no official explanation yet, bloggers seem to agree that Thuong shared in kickbacks from a big highway construction contract while he was chief of the party organization in Quang Ngai province a decade ago. Thuong was a Trong protégé, chosen to replace Nguyen Xuan Phuc as president when, after a scandal involving Covid masks came to light, Phuc was “allowed to resign” just 14 months ago.
More important and more worrisome for Vietnam, as David Brown reported, the Trong era is likely to be remembered as a time of missed opportunities, the war on corruption aside. Fueled by massive foreign investment and a still-young workforce, Vietnam’s economy is booming. Meanwhile, modernization, globalization, and crony capitalism have spawned urgent problems, including growing income inequality, environmental degradation, and underfunded public health and public education systems. These kinds of challenges typically stymie regimes that stifle grassroots initiative and throttle public debate.
Nor, in a political system that lacks checks and balances on the use and misuse of power, is systemic corruption going to be eradicated—no matter how many strategic cadres Trong and his protégés manage to deploy. Less than two years from now, party leaders will convene for their 15th Congress and, probably, Trong’s retirement. There’s no reason to expect that the party will have by then been cleansed. Scandals show no sign of ending.